“Muscle-bound monkeys do not play for me.”

I can still hear Bob Millard, the basketball coach at Muhlenberg High School, saying exactly that when he spoke to my eighth grade team about how to train in the off-season. A similar sentiment was also expressed by the Muhl’s high school baseball coach, so I never lifted weights in high school.

My basketball and baseball coaches in college expected players to lift weights in the off-season, but gave little instruction as to how to go about it, so when I finally started, I paid special attention to the big dudes in the weight room who looked as if they knew what they were doing. And what they were doing was “maxing out,” seeing how much weight they could lift for a single repetition performing the exercise that was clearly the most important to them, the bench press, most times they worked out.

As a result, I did the same — come hell or high water. If that meant I had to squirm and wriggle and thrust my hips skyward in order to claim I lifted five or 10 more pounds than the last workout, I did so.

As a result, I would get really sore yet not gain much muscle. For the life of me, I couldn’t figure out why I looked more like a marathon runner than a middle linebacker — until as a sophomore I took a course designed for prospective coaches at Moravian College.

During one class, Dan Riley, the strength coach of Penn State’s football team, spoke to us about weightlifting. One thing he said changed the way I viewed lifting weights forever.

How you lift the weight is more important than how much weight you lift.

To prove that moving massive amounts of weight isn’t essential for total muscle fatigue, Riley asked the guy I thought was the best athlete on campus, a starting defensive back who was also an all-league outfielder, to do a set of seated shoulder presses, aka military presses. But not with a barbell, dumbbells, or even a Universal machine.

With a broomstick.

A broomstick that probably weighed no more than two pounds.

When the set started, however, Riley applied pressure to the broomstick on both its way up and down. By rep number 10, the guy was grunting and groaning and sweat started beading across his forehead.

But he didn’t give up, partially because Riley knew to let up, to apply less and less resistance as the guy got more and more fatigued. And then, about 10 reps later when the guy was totally fatigued, Riley took his hands off the bar and barked, “One more rep.”

I watched in amazement as a guy who could probably handle 250 pounds for multiple reps on the bench press quivered and quaked, making the broomstick inch upwards erratically, as if he were hoisting 150 pounds.

But so much for the good, old days. Now it’s time to turn my nostalgia into your knowledge.

What Riley demonstrated to that class is that heavy weight is not needed to create the muscle fatigue required to make weightlifting effective. Later, I would pass that same idea along to the weightlifting classes I taught by saying, “The amount of weight you use is not as important as getting the targeted muscles to move it.”

Which is exactly why weightlifting in some way, shape, or form is something you can and should do.

One year after I listened Dan Riley’s lecture, he left Penn State. Although he professed to love Happy Valley, Joe Gibbs, the coach of the Washington Redskins, made him an offer he simply could not refuse: to train pros.

Did his weightlifting theory work in the NFL? The first year Riley joined the Redskins, they won the Super Bowl.

Mere coincidence?

Not if you ask Mo Elewonibi, an offensive lineman on that team who offered this to Warner Hessler of the Daily Press in a 1991 interview: ‘’We had a huge facility and a good [weightlifting] program that was regarded as being second only to Texas A&M [at his college, Brigham Young University]. I thought I was ready to play when I got here, but I found that I wasn’t.

“My legs, for one thing, were not as strong as I thought. Everybody wants to look big in college, but not here. We’re not into power lifting here. Dan’s program is designed to build strength in your legs, hip, back, and neck, the kind of strength you need on the field.”

Which is exactly what I want weightlifting to do for you: build the strength that you need in order to better do whatever you want to do — whether that’s playing football, playing with your grandkids, planting trees, or practicing the fiddle.

For specific instruction on how to make weightlifting’s unrivaled versatility work best for you, read next week’s column.